Front Gallery

Elisabeth Condon, "Climb the Black Mountain"

April 13 through May 15, 2011
Opening reception: April 13, 2011, 6-8 pm

Elisabeth Condon, "Climb the Black Mountain". Image #27

When digital culture and scientific research confirm the world is a projection of the mind, I find it no longer possible to perceive landscape as unified, any more than a painting can be. Instead, space unfurls as movement, in lavish pours of paint that establish frameworks for visual improvisation.  In this way painting is like travel, forging structure from a patchwork of elements and circumstances that in my work include diverse locations, color, Chinese idioms, old album covers, digital projections and patterns.

 

The itinerant lifestyle described in rock and roll lyrics and the American Beats’ aspirations to transcend materialistic culture through meditation and travel reinforce my fascination with movement as a vehicle of transformation. In the singular perspective of an earlier period, Kerouac assembled his experience of travel into a scroll’s unfolding narrative. I cut and paste multiple narratives to make composite landscape, which balance depth of field and flatness, sequence and immediacy. 

 

Throughout, my paintings express the Chinese principle of landscape as a synthesis of memory and experience. Interweaving Yuan Dynasty scrolls, with the Flinstones and painting’s components—gesture, shape and scale—they fuse narrative and abstraction.

 

E.C. 2011